The great length to which this paper has expanded will preclude the possibility of giving any space to the history of the missions of France in Louisiana, and those extending from Canada into what is now New York and into the regions west of that state. This omission will be the more pardonable inasmuch as the history of the French missions is better known to Catholic readers than much of our other remote ecclesiastical history. There is one page, however, in these annals, touching the Christian settlements on our northeastern border, that we cannot pass over without notice. The town in the British Provinces now known as Annapolis was the point where Catholicity made its first foothold in any portion of the region north of us, at least the first since the time of the Northmen. Here, in 1608, two Jesuit missionaries arrived, who in 1613 were to be the pioneers of the Abnaki mission in Maine. The Recollects, a branch of the Franciscans, began their labors in Quebec in 1615. Other religious men, and some communities of pious women, came to their assistance. Notwithstanding wars between the various tribes, in the course of which the once powerful Hurons were almost annihilated, the missionaries had gathered together, by 1685, a number of Christian villages of Indians on the St. Lawrence, of which three still exist. Thence, missionaries were sent to the shores of Lake Superior, to the tribes south of the lakes, to Arkansas, and to the lower Mississippi. The heroic lives, the sufferings, and the death of Jogues, Brébeuf, and Lalemant, and so many other holy men who consecrated their lives to these missions, are almost familiar themes.
Of the Abnaki mission referred to above, and which was established on Mount Desert Island at the mouth of the Penobscot, nothing remained after a few years except a solitary cross guarding the grave of a French lay-brother, who died from wounds received in an attack made on the mission by the English from Virginia. The fathers were carried off by them on this occasion, and narrowly escaped being put to death by the authorities of Virginia. Thus, as Mr. Shea remarks, the first Abnaki mission was crushed in its very cradle by men who founded a colony in which the Gospel was never announced to the aborigines.
In 1642, an Abnaki who had been rescued from death by a Christian Indian, in one of the forays made by the pagan Iroquois on their neighbors, extolled the virtues of the Christians so highly on his return home that his people sent for black-gowns. Father Druillettes was sent to them in 1646, and the wonderful change effected by him in the few months of his stay excited even the admiration of the English, whose countrymen in Massachusetts were at this time enacting cruel laws against the religion and the order to which F. Druillettes belonged. In 1650, he returned to the Abnakis, and was received by them at Norridgewock, their principal village, amidst volleys of firearms, and with every demonstration of delight. A banquet was spread in every cabin, and he was forced to visit all.
“We have thee at last,” they cried; “thou art our father, our patriarch, our countryman. Thou livest like us, thou dwellest with us, thou art an Abnaki like us. Thou bringest back joy to all the country. We had thought of leaving this land to seek thee, for many have died in thy absence. We were losing all hopes of reaching heaven. Those whom thou didst instruct performed all that they had learned, but their heart was weary, for it sought and could not find thee.”
At the same time that Druillettes was planting the faith among the Abnakis—who have preserved to this day the precious legacy bequeathed to them—Rev. John Eliot of Roxbury, certainly a well-meaning man and a credit to the times and to the people among whom he lived, was endeavoring to christianize the Indians of Massachusetts—an attempt which the cruelty and rapacity of his countrymen would have rendered abortive, even if his barren theology had been able to affect anything in their behalf. So Drake, the Indian historian, admits that even among Eliot’s nominal disciples there was not the least probability that one-fourth of them were sincere believers in Christianity. Eliot himself said, before his death, “There is a dark cloud upon the work of the Gospel among the poor Indians.” In King Philip’s war even the Indian ministers threw off all disguise and took up arms against their white Christian neighbors. This last struggle against their destroyers resulted in a total ruin of the Indians. The Puritan, imagining himself the chosen of God, and regarding the Indians as Amalekites and Canaanites whom he was to exterminate out of the promised land, fell upon them with fire and sword.
Even the innocent son of King Philip, the last of the family of Massasoit, was sold into slavery to Bermuda by the men whose children have since lifted the finger of scorn at the population of the South, among whom England forced the institution that lately perished amid the throes of civil war—forced it by the aid, in part, of the vessels and the means of the pious fathers of New England. Father Druillettes, strange to say, visited Eliot, by whom he was hospitably received and entertained, and who invited him to pass the winter under his roof. But this visit to New England was probably one of business, and the father was soon with his beloved Indians again.
Father Rale was among the successors of Druillettes. An expedition of New Englanders destroyed his church and village in 1705, but the cession of the territory to England by France in 1713 restored temporary peace to the Abnaki mission. A deputation of their chiefs therefore visited Boston, and called upon the governor to solicit means for the rebuilding of their church. As Protestantism is always ready to interfere with religious enterprises which it could never itself have succeeded in, this exponent of the religion of New England offered to rebuild their church at his own expense if they would dismiss their missionary and take a minister of his own choice. The reply of the indignant spokesman of the Indians is worth quoting:
“When you first came here,” said he, “you saw me long before the French governors, but neither your predecessors nor your ministers ever spoke to me of prayer or the Great Spirit. They saw my furs, my beaver and moose skins, and of this alone they thought; these alone they sought, and so eagerly that I have been unable to supply them with enough. When I had much, they were my friends, and only then. One day my canoe missed the route; I lost my path, and wandered a long way at random, until at last I landed near Quebec, in a great village of the Algonquins, where the black-gowns were teaching. Scarcely had I arrived, when one of them came to see me. I was loaded with furs, but the black-gown of France disdained to look at them; he spoke to me of the Great Spirit, of heaven, of hell, of the prayer which is the only way to reach heaven. I heard him with pleasure, and was so delighted by his words that I remained in the village near him. At last the prayer pleased me, and I asked to be instructed: I solicited baptism, and received it. Then I returned to the lodges of my tribe, and related all that had happened. All envied my happiness, and wished to partake it; they too went to the black-gown to be baptized. Thus have the French acted. Had you spoken to me of the prayer as soon as we met, I should now be so unhappy as to pray like you, for I could not have told whether your prayer was good or bad. Now I hold to the prayer of the French; I agree to it; I shall be faithful to it, even until the earth is burned and destroyed. Keep your men, your gold, and your minister: I will go to my French father.”
In the unsettled condition of the boundaries, the New Englanders continued to make incursions upon the territory of the Abnakis. In one of these expeditions, Father Rale barely escaped capture, but his celebrated Abnaki dictionary was pounced upon and carried off, and now forms one of the treasures of the library of Harvard University. In 1724, he fell a victim to the persistence of his enemies. Notwithstanding these cruelties, the Abnakis, in the war of the Revolution, took part in the defence of the soil against England with the people who had desolated their home and put to death their beloved pastor. Orono, the Penobscot chief, bore a commission throughout the Revolution, and distinguished himself during the war as much by his bravery as by his attachment to his religion, never consenting to frequent Protestant places of worship.
These sketches, grown so much more lengthy than we had expected, and yet restrained with difficulty within their present bounds, must now close. May they be read with the attention the subject deserves, and thus serve to awaken the honest pride of our fellow-Catholics in the past history of their church on the soil of the United States. May our men of culture, stimulated by the appeal that shall be made to them by the reading classes, spread far and wide the affecting story of the church’s triumphs and reverses in our land, with all the glorious details of the lives and deaths of its heroes and martyrs! May this history grow to be a familiar one to the generation that is rising and the generations that shall succeed it. We love our country, and none dare question our love but they who would have the statute-books bristle with laws against us such as the genius of our institutions forbids and the fathers of the Republic rejected. Let us show our love for it by mingling the memories of all that is dear to us in the career of our religion with all that is noble and inspiring in the civil history of our land, our fair heritage of political and religious freedom.